In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.

GENEVA — A dancing duo of cosmic beacons has provided scientists with the most precise measurement, albeit an indirect one, of ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves.

The measurement comes from analyzing the only known pair of gravitationally bound pulsars, dense cores of dead stars that emit intense beams of radio waves with the regularity of a nearly perfect clock. Michael...

GENEVA — An effect of general relativity that is barely measurable on Earth has been spotted in full force around a black hole.

Physicists detected the signature of a black hole twisting the fabric of spacetime around it. The discovery offers the best evidence yet of this relativity-driven twisting effect, known as frame dragging, around a black hole where it is most powerful. The...

A grueling but ultimately successful effort to test Einstein’s 100-year-old general theory of relativity has come to a close more than half a century after it began. Twenty-one papers published online November 17 in Classical and Quantum Gravity present a detailed summation of Gravity Probe B, a satellite that in 2011 confirmed Einstein’s prediction that Earth dents and whips up the spacetime...

One of the most powerful known magnifying lenses isn’t found on Earth. The lens is built from stars, gas and dark matter and lies about 4 billion light-years away. As astronomers peer through it, they are finding the seeds of galaxies that were scattered around the universe more than 13 billion years ago.

The lens is known as Abell 2744, a cosmic pileup where four groups of galaxies are...

You don’t need an anniversary as an excuse to write a book about Albert Einstein. But the centennial of his general theory of relativity has nonetheless provided an occasion for several new entries in the Einstein library. And even though general relativity — Einstein’s theory of gravity — has been thoroughly explored many times, some 2015 publications do offer new twists and insights.

Before Einstein, space seemed featureless and changeless, as Isaac Newton had defined it two centuries earlier. And time, Newton declared, flowed at its own pace, oblivious to the clocks that measured it. But Einstein looked at space and time and saw a single dynamic stage — spacetime — on which matter and energy strutted,...

Generally speaking, general relativity is not the sort of physics that offers much fodder for amateurs. Its mathematical intricacies were too much even for Einstein at first. He struggled for years to find the equations that showed how general relativity could describe gravity, finally succeeding in 1915.

But a couple of decades later, an eccentric amateur noticed a consequence of...

One of the first steps toward becoming a scientist is discovering the difference between speed and velocity.

To nonscientists, it’s usually a meaningless distinction. Fast is fast, slow is slow. But speed, technically, refers only to rate of motion. Velocity encompasses both speed and direction. In science, you usually want to know more than just how fast...